I've submitted several complaints to AWS to get this traffic to stop, their typical followup is: We have engaged with our customer, and based on this engagement have determined that the reported activity does not require further action from AWS at this time.
I've tried various 4XX responses to see if the bot will back off, I've tried 30X redirects (which it follows) to no avail.
The traffic is hitting numbers that require me to re-negotiate my contract with CloudFlare and is otherwise a nuisance when reviewing analytics/logs.
I've considered redirecting the entirety of the traffic to aws abuse report page, but at this scall, it's essentially a small DDoS network and sending it anywhere could be considered abuse in itself.
Are there others that have similar experience?
gzip bomb is good if the bot happens to be vulnerable, but even just slowing down their connection rate is often sufficient - waiting just 10 seconds before responding with your 404 is going to consume ~7,000 ports on their box, which should be enough to crash most linux processes (nginx + mod-http-echo is a really easy way to set this up)
It was pretty clear in our case that they were scraping our site to get our pricing data. Our master catalog had several million SKUs, priced dynamically based on availability, customer contracts, and other factors. And we tried to add some value to the product pages, with relevant recommendations for cross-sells, alternate choices, etc. This was pretty compute-intensive, and the volume of the scraping could amount to a DoS at times. Like, they could bury us in bursts of requests so quickly that our infrastructure couldn't spin up new virtual servers, and once we were buried, it was difficult to dig back out from under the load. We learned a lot during this period, including some very counterintuitive stuff about how some approaches to queuing and prioritizing that appeared sounded great on paper, actually could have unintended effects that made such situations worse.
One strategy we talked about was that, rather than blocking the bad guys, we'd tag the incoming traffic. We couldn't do this perfect accuracy, but the inaccuracy was such that we could at least ensure that it wasn't affecting real customers (because we could always know when it was a real, logged-in user). We realized that we could at least cache the data in the borderline cases so we wouldn't have to recalculate (it was a particularly stupid bot that was attacking us, re-requesting the same stuff many times over); from that it was a small step to see that we could at the same time add a random fudge factor into any numbers, hoping to get to a state where the data did our attacker more harm than good.
We wound up doing what the OP is now doing, working with CloudFlare to identify and mitigate "attacks" as rapidly as possible. But there's no doubt that it cost us a LOT, in terms of developer time, payments to CF, and customer dissatisfaction.
By the way, this was all the more frustrating because we had circumstantial evidence that the attacker was a service contracted by one of our competitors. And if they'd come straight to us to talk about it, we'd have been much happier (and I think they would have been as well) to offer an API through which they could get the catalog data easily and in a way where we don't have to spend all the compute on the value-added stuff we were doing for humans. But of course they'd never come to us, or even admit it if asked, so we were stuck. And while this was going, there was also a case in the courts that was discussed many times here on HN. It was a question about blocking access to public sites, and the consensus here was something like "if you're going to have a site on the web, then it's up to you to ensure that you can support any requests, and if you can't find a way to withstand DoS-level traffic, it's your own fault for having a bad design". So it's interesting today to see that attitudes have changed.
> had circumstantial evidence that the attacker was a service contracted by one of our competitors
> we'd have been much happier ... to offer an API through which they could get the catalog data easily
Why not feed them bad data?